*Photos and article by: Dylan Terry
Stylized as “10’ To Kill,” you and a number of other players are randomly assigned an animal and three targets. City street tiles are laid out at random, policemen are placed, and the game begins. The objective is to eliminate your targets and earn the most points.
Each character is mechanically identical with three methods to assassinate a target: handgun, allowing you to remove a target on an adjacent tile, a knife which allows attacks against those sharing your tile, and a rifle, which allows you to remove a target along the same row of tiles as yourself…as long as your character stands on one of the blue-highlighted High Ground spots.
What you end up with is an incredibly simple to learn, yet tactical to play puzzle game where you try to keep track of which character is where, who has moved when, and how best to set yourself up without drawing the police’s attention.
I learned how apt the name is during my demo, where the three of us managed to eliminate the majority of our targets within the ten minute timespan. This would be a great travel game, as it requires very little space, nearly no time to set up, and you can get a number of different plays in during your time waiting for the bus or doing whatever folks with real grown-up jobs do.
The components are high-quality cardboard with plastic stands for the characters. Character tiles are good and thick, and there’s a nice weight to the city tiles. They have enough of a presence to them that you won’t dent them with your fingernails like you might with plain old cardstock.
Plus, all the characters are anthropomorphic animals, so it’s appropriate for kids…kind of.
